The present invention relates to modems. One contemporary example of a modem is one operating in accordance with International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation V.34, commonly referred to as "V.34 modem." The ITU-T Recommendation V.34 of September 1994, entitled Data Communication over the Digital Network, is hereby incorporated by reference.
It has become quite common for high-speed modems, such as V.34 modems, to perform a rate change during a communication session, when one modem experiences transmission difficulties such that the transmission rate between the other modem and itself needs to be re-negotiated accordingly. For V.34 modems, the rate change cannot be performed in a "seamless" way such that the session will need to be shut down and restarted after the rate change. This has been a drawback for the conventional V.34 modems.
In an ITU-T Study Group 14 meeting in Orlando, Fla., Dec. 13-14, 1993, there was a contribution, where an auxiliary channel operating procedure for seamless rate change an modem control was proposed for V.34. Later in another Study Group 14 meeting in Clearwater, Fla., Jan. 8-10, 1996, that same procedure was proposed as an extension for (then accepted) V.34, and accepted at the meeting as a baseline draft for V.34 seamless ate change procedure. Finally, in a TR-30 Technical Committee meeting of the TIA in Honolulu, Feb. 5-9, 1996, a technical contribution was made by Rockwell International, the Assignee of the present invention, for a faster seamless rate change, and her for a modem control channel for V.34. The Contributions made during the Orlando, Clearwater and Honolulu meetings are hereby incorporated by reference.
In the Clearwater contribution, the proposed scheme of using the modem control superframes to do seamless rate change was still too slow and problematic for some applications. If a seamless rate change requested from a local modem to a remote modem took a whole superframe to be effected, some modem receivers (e.g. on cellular connections) would already have collapsed and a full retrain would be necessary. Therefore, there has been a tremendous demand for faster seamless rate change such that the procedure ill keep up with the ever-evolving communications systems, such as wireless applications.
Also, as applications become more multimedia-oriented, there has been great demand for the channel to accommodate more than just one form of data in an efficient way.